Fool's Gold (10 page)

“I can't help it,” Heather said, and then giggled again before she could go on. “I just keep seeing his head and legs sticking out of that hedge.”

“Yeah,” Barney said. “And old Badger standing there looking at him—like he couldn't figure out what he was doing up there.”

That gave Rudy an idea. “Hey,” he said. “You know what? I think old Styler may have invented a new gymnastic sport called ‘hedge vaulting.'”

“Yeah,” Barney said. “One of those long-horse stunts. You vault off the horse and land in the hedge.” Mr. Jacobs, the P.E. teacher at Pyramid Hill Middle School, was into gymnastics, so they all knew about things like long horses and parallel bars and balance beams.

“You got it,” Rudy said. “Off a long horse—preferably a sorrel but any good long horse will do—and right into the hedge.”

They laughed so hard they almost spooked Bluebell, and when they finally calmed down Heather said in a very serious tone of voice, “And you get the most points for a really good dismount and landing,” and they all fell apart all over again. By the time they got back to the barnyard Rudy's stomach ached from laughing.

R
UDY WOKE UP
the next morning feeling pretty good. On the one hand, the riding school project was probably finished, at least as far as Ty was concerned, but the good news was that maybe it didn't matter anymore. Maybe Barney had finally seen through the old Ty-wanese Kid and had enough of him. And without Ty around to egg him on, Rudy was pretty sure he could talk Barney out of the whole gold-mining scheme. Particularly now that there was Heather and the riding lessons to occupy his mind.

But that same evening—it was Wednesday and Rudy had survived another long afternoon of baby-sitting—he found out differently. Natasha and the M and M's had gone downtown right after dinner and Rudy was alone in the house, except for Ophelia. After reading the funnies and checking the TV schedule, he decided to call Barney. The conversation had started off about the riding lesson and Heather, but then the subject of Tyler Lewis came up, and it seemed that Barney had been talking to him on the phone.

“You called Styler up?” Rudy asked, and bit his tongue to keep from asking why.

“Yeah,” Barney said. “Just to see how he was getting along. Like, if he had blood poisoning or tetanus or anything. He could have, you know, with all those punctures. Punctures are how you get tetanus.”

“Yeah, so I've heard,” Rudy said. “Well, did he? Have tetanus?”

“Guess not. He didn't even want to talk about it. All he wanted to talk about was how he'd figured out a way to solve the lamp problem. You know. The one on his miner's helmet.”

“You mean that carbide thing,” Rudy asked. “I did a report on those things once. They were pretty dangerous. They make this flammable gas when water drips into the carbide stuff and then there's a switch that hits a flint that makes a spark. Then if you're lucky you get a flame. And if you're unlucky you get a minor explosion, and maybe burn off your eyebrows.”

Barney laughed. “Yeah, that's what Ty found out. He said he singed himself a few times, so he went another route. He kind of smashed the lamp part down and taped a flashlight on top of the helmet instead. He said I ought to fix mine the same way.”

Rudy felt something heavy hit the bottom of his stomach with a thud. “Yours?” he asked in what he hoped wasn't a quavery voice. “You mean, you have one too?”

“No,” Barney said. “Not yet.”

Not just “no.” That wouldn't have been so bad, although something like, “No, and I don't want one,” would have been even better. But “not yet”? That could only mean one thing.

The conversation fizzled out after that, and as soon as Rudy hung up the phone he kind of lurched across the room and dropped into a chair at the kitchen table.

So, the gold-mining scheme was still in the works. He couldn't believe it. What he found hardest to believe, in fact, was that Barney could still be interested in doing anything at all with Tyler Lewis, now that he'd been shown up as a cement-brained, loudmouthed show-off.
And a chicken besides.

A chicken. Tyler Lewis was a chicken. A strange raging tornado was building up inside Rudy's head. He crashed his fist down on the table and then jumped up and kicked the chair he'd been sitting in so hard that it tipped over. Across the room Ophelia leaped to her feet and began to bark.

“Shut up, you nerdy dog,” Rudy yelled, and stormed out of the kitchen and down the hall. In his own room he collapsed sideways across his bed and covered his face with his arm.

With Natasha and the girls away it was very quiet in the house. No sound at all at first and then only an occasional whimper from Ophelia, who had followed him into the room and was now snuffling nervously at his feet.

“Shut up, Ophelia,” he said again, but this time with a lot less energy. The raging anger was getting away from him, no matter how hard he tried to hang on to it. And the thing was, he knew that when it was gone he was going to start thinking, and that was exactly what he didn't want to do.

He was going to have to start thinking about why that word “chicken” had made him so angry. It had, all right. He'd started losing it the minute he'd thought of calling Ty a chicken—and the reason, of course, was that getting angry took the place of admitting the truth. The truth! Which was, of course, that it wasn't Ty Lewis who was the real major-league, world-class chicken. But that was exactly what he definitely
wasn't going to think about.

And he wasn't going to waste time making up excuses for himself either. Useless excuses about not wanting to do something that was not only dangerous but also against the law, which did
not
mean you were chicken—it only meant you were sensible. Useless because he knew—knew absolutely—that the reason he couldn't and wouldn't and never would—no matter what—go down into that hole in the ground was because the very thought of it
scared him to death.
And that had to mean something.

Rudy jumped to his feet, started across the room, tripped over Ophelia, crashed into the dresser, hopped around holding his right knee and his left elbow while saying a few unprintable things under his breath, and then managed to make it out the door. He stormed down the hall, through the kitchen and the studio, into the living room, and out the front door. Standing on the veranda he looked down Lone Pine toward town, but there was no sign of Natasha and the M and M's. Wasn't that just like women. Always underfoot when you didn't want them to be and never there when you needed them. Like when you really needed somebody—anybody—to talk to.

It was strangely quiet on the veranda too. The weird silence that he'd noticed in the house seemed to be everywhere. No noisy tourists around and not even any traffic sounds drifting up from downtown. Nothing except for a faint, familiar sound—the clickety-clack of a typewriter. Murph.

Murph came to the door looking even more rumpled than usual. His corkscrew hair was standing out all around his head and he was wearing a ratty old bathrobe over his usual jeans and long-sleeved undershirt. For a moment his eyes looked blank and unfocused, as if he were having trouble relating to what his eyes were seeing. As if his mind was still busy with whatever it was he'd been writing. But then he got back to normal.

“Rudy,” he said, smiling warmly. “Come on in.”

Rudy felt guilty. Although he'd always been in the habit of visiting Murph pretty much whenever he felt like it, he'd never done it before when the typewriter was going. He'd always kind of felt that, since Murph was a writer who very rarely got it together to do any writing, it didn't seem right to interrupt him when he did.

“I—I guess you're busy,” Rudy said, starting to back away.

“Well…” Murph began, and then stopped and gave Rudy his narrow-eyed “student of humanity” stare. “No,” he said. “Not very busy. Come right on in, my boy. I was just about to knock off anyway and have a bit of refreshment. How about joining me in a cup of coffee?”

Rudy thought of saying that he didn't think they'd fit—but then decided against it. Somehow he just didn't have the energy to wise off even when such a cheap shot presented itself. Instead he just nodded, gulped at the lump in his throat, managed a squeaky, “Thanks,” and followed Murph into the kitchen.

By the time they were both seated at the table with cups of coffee—with a lot of milk and sugar in Rudy's case, since Murph's coffee was always industrial strength—his voice, at least, had gotten back to normal. But what he started talking about, of course, had nothing to do with what had made him desperate enough to interrupt the writing of the great Murph Woodbury novel. What he started talking about was Heather and the riding lesson.

Of course, Murph knew all about the inheritance. That was the kind of information that any “student of humanity” worth his salt would be right on top of. He'd also heard, it so happened, a bit about the lesson at Lawford's.

“I stopped by the Hanrahans on Sunday morning and heard all about it,” he said. “It seems the riding-stables lesson was a qualified success.”

“Right,” Rudy said. “It was pretty much of a wipeout, I guess. So I fixed it up for her to get some lessons from Barney. On Applesauce. You know, Angela's barrel racing horse.”

“Ah, yes,” Murph said. “The pretty dapple-gray mare. I've seen Angela riding the gray in the barrel race event at the Penn Valley Rodeo. Beautiful animal. And how did the lesson go?”

So Rudy told him all about it, including Ty's part. How Ty had his first riding lesson on Monday, and decided that he was the world's greatest natural-born horseman. And how yesterday, he'd insisted on riding Badger and had wound up sitting in the hedge.

He really enjoyed telling Murph about that, and about the ride afterward and what a good time he and Barney and Heather had, and how they'd made up all the stuff about the new gymnastic event called hedge vaulting. By the time he'd finished, Murph was laughing and so was Rudy—and feeling a lot better.

Then Murph stopped laughing and said, “So. What do you suppose Barney sees in this Ty character?”

Rudy looked up quickly. As usual, Murph had picked up on the really heavy stuff without its even being mentioned. At least not in so many words.

Rudy shrugged. “Who knows? I guess they have some things in common. I guess they both like to… well, kind of live dangerously. You know, do stuff like…” But he couldn't get into that. “Hey,” he said instead. “I'm sorry I interrupted your writing. What are you working on these days, anyway? You've really been going at it lately. I heard your typewriter this morning and then again tonight.”

Murph grinned. “Yes, you're right. I have been a bit more fired up than usual. The other day I got out an old novel I started years ago and when I read it over it sounded—well, better than I remembered. So…”

“Oh, yeah? What's it about?”

“About a young woman. A gifted, spirited young woman who had a particular problem that pretty much ruined her life. Actually the central character is loosely based on my mother. Perhaps you've heard something about my mother?”

Rudy nodded, trying not to look embarrassed. What he'd heard was that Murph's mother had been crazy. Of course, she'd been dead for years and years, but in a town like Pyramid Hill where a lot of families had been around for generations, rumors like that hung around for a long time.

Murph was waiting for an answer. “Well, yes. I guess what I heard was…”

“That she was insane? Well, that isn't true, you know. My mother was quite normal except in one limited but very significant way. It was just that she suffered from a particular phobia. Do you know about phobias, Rudy?”

Rudy thought he did. “Isn't it when you're really afraid of something? Like, they used to call rabies ‘hydrophobia' because they thought anyone who had it was afraid of water.”

“Right,” Murph said. “But the word implies something more than just being afraid. What it implies is a terrible unreasoned panic in someone who is, otherwise, quite normal. In my mother's case it was obviously agoraphobia, although it was never formally diagnosed.”

“Agoraphobia?” Rudy asked.

“Yes. Literally, fear of the marketplace. But what it means to a victim is a growing fear of any sort of open space. Until they are finally confined to their own home, or even to a single room. My poor mother went from being a happy and normal young mother to being less and less able to go anywhere. For the last twenty years of her life she never set foot outside the walls of this dark old house. And yet she was quite normal in other ways.”

After that Murph really got wound up, like he did sometimes, when he started telling about things that happened a long time ago. He went on and on about his mother's problem and how she had to give up going to church and to friends' houses and even to the store, and how people gradually got to think of her as a kind of mental case, and finally no one even came to see her.

It was an interesting story in a depressing sort of way, but right at first Rudy was only mildly curious. It all seemed, like a lot of Murph's stories, out of date and not related to modern everyday life. It wasn't until Murph started in on what happened when his mother tried to “pull herself together” like everyone kept telling her to do, and “force herself to go right on outside,” that Rudy really began to listen carefully.

“A terrible blind panic,” Murph called it. “Racing heart, shortness of breath, and uncontrollable feelings of terror…” And somewhere in the midst of Murph's story something suddenly went off in Rudy's head. Like an explosion going off.

“A blind panic about certain ordinary things,”
Murph had said. Things like crawling under a house or getting locked in a storage cupboard.
“A crazy blind panic in someone who was quite normal in other ways.”
Quite normal—like someone who was maybe a natural-born extrovert and probably the second most popular guy at Pyramid Hill Middle School.
“A racing heart, shortness of breath, and uncontrollable feelings of terror…”
The words kept repeating themselves in his head.