Fool's Gold (17 page)

On this particular afternoon he came into the kitchen and noticed that there were a bunch of dolls scattered around on the big oak table. Moira was holding a Barbie and Margot had the Ken doll and they were making the dolls have some kind of conversation. At first Rudy thought it was just your routine Barbie and Ken thing, and he'd started exploring the refrigerator for something to eat when he overheard what Margot was making the Ken doll say—and started to really tune in.

In a phony deep voice Margot was making the Ken doll say, “Hurry up, Natasha. I haven't got all day.”

Rudy closed the refrigerator and sat down at the table. “Natasha?” he asked. “Where's Natasha?”

“This is Mom,” Moira said, bouncing the Barbie doll up and down.

Rudy pointed at the Ken doll. “And who's that, then?”

“Daddy,” Margot said. “This is Daddy.”

Rudy was interested right away. The conversation he'd had with Moira about her not liking to be alone had gotten him started thinking about how Art's skipping out had affected Moira and Margot. Neither one of them mentioned Art much anymore, at least not to Rudy. But once, only a few months ago, he'd overheard Moira asking Natasha some questions: Where was Daddy? and When was he going to come back?

“Okay, got it,” Rudy said. “That's Art and that is Natasha. And where is Margot—and Moira. And Rudy, too, for that matter. I want to see Rudy.”

It turned out that a yellow-headed Dutch doll was supposed to be Margot and the Japanese doll was Moira.

“And Rudy?”

“Well.” Moira looked around the table. It was obvious that a Rudy doll hadn't been chosen yet. “Here,” she said finally with one of her teasing smiles. “This is Rudy.” She held up a troll doll—a short squatty little plastic job with a big nose and lots of green hair.

“Thanks a lot, pal,” Rudy said. He took the troll doll and made it bounce the way the girls always did to show that a doll was supposed to be saying something. “Okay, I'm Rudy,” he made the troll say. “What are we doing? What's going on here?”

“We're pretending it's Christmas,” Moira said. “It's Christmas and we're opening our presents.” She picked up the Japanese doll, pushed its arms forward, and made it hold a little plastic mermaid that had come from the top of one of the swizzle sticks Art used to bring home from the 7 Seas Saloon. “Look. I got a beautiful mermaid doll for Christmas. Thank you, Mama and Daddy, for the beautiful doll.”

“Don't thank me,” Margot made the Ken doll say gruffly. “I wouldn't waste my money on expensive junk like that.”

Rudy was surprised. Margot had only been five years old when Art split, but apparently she remembered how Art was always griping about Natasha's spending too much money. But as the game went on it became clear that she remembered Art pretty clearly.

Moira, on the other hand, seemed to be involved in a typically Moira-ish fantasy. In her game she was making Art and Natasha into some kind of superromantic couple. She had the out-of-focus look in her eyes that she always got when she was playing one of her pretend games, and when it was her turn to play the part of Art she had him saying phony things like, “Thank you, Natasha darling, for the beautiful wrist-watch. It's just what I wanted.”

It wasn't until Rudy made the troll doll say, “What did I get for Christmas? Did anybody get a present for poor old green-haired Rudy?” that Moira's fantasy world got away from her.

All of a sudden her dreamy smile faded and her big-eyed face scrunched into a frown. “That's enough out of you, kid,” she said in a mean-sounding voice. “Shut your big mouth and keep it shut.”

It really jolted Rudy, because he remembered Art saying those very words more than once—whenever he thought Rudy was getting too much attention. And it obviously jolted Moira too. She stared at the Ken doll for a minute as if she really thought the words had come out of its mouth, and then she looked at Rudy with a shocked expression on her face.

Just as the game was getting interesting, a neighbor kid came over to get Moira and Margot to go skating, so Rudy didn't get to find out any more about what the girls remembered about Art and how they felt about him. But later as he sat on the veranda reading and watching the skating he was wondering if Moira's phony memories had anything to do with her teasing people. Maybe she wasn't admitting to herself how angry she was at Art for skipping out, so the anger had to come out in other ways and at other people. Perhaps, if they played the doll family game again, or at least if he could talk to Moira some more, he might find out if his guess was right. And in the meantime, maybe he'd talk to Natasha about it, if she wasn't too tired when she got home.

Only, Natasha seemed pretty tired that night and then, right after dinner, there was another phone call for Rudy.

“Yo, dude,” Tyler said when Rudy picked up the receiver. “My folks are out for the evening and there's a lot of beer in the frig. Want to come over and get drunk?”

“Well, I guess not,” Rudy said. “Getting drunk makes me destroy things, particularly antiques. The last time I got drunk I smashed a lot of valuable antique chairs. With a sledgehammer. I'm just not to be trusted around beer and French Provincial furniture. Particularly the gilded stuff. The gilded stuff really freaks me out.”

“Yeah?” Tyler sounded dubious. “You putting me on?”

“Me? Putting you on? Why would I do a thing like that?”

Tyler's next suggestion was that they go to the video store and try to convince the clerk that they were eighteen so they could rent a porno movie.

“Look, Styler,” Rudy told him. “You are obviously still thinking big-city. Everyone in this town knows exactly how old I am, not to mention how old my mother is, and probably how old her mother was. Not to mention what her phone number is in case somebody wanted to call and let her know what I was up to. And most of them probably know who you are by now too. We'd never get away with it.”

“Yeah, well, I guess you're right. So, how about going to see
Robin Hood?
My treat.”

So they saw
Robin Hood
together, and on Thursday night Rudy actually did go to Tyler's house to watch TV, eat microwave popcorn, and drink his mother's Diet 7-Up. Nobody mentioned beer.

And on the way to the movie, and in between TV shows, Tyler did a lot more talking about things like having money and not having money and what it had been like when his folks lost all theirs. And the terrible things he heard about what happened to people who got sent to juvenile hall. The more Rudy listened the more certain he became that horses weren't the only things bad old Tyler Lewis was scared to death of.

Getting to know Tyler better turned out to have a surprising effect on Rudy. It wasn't that he actually liked the guy more. Not when he knew for certain that things would be right back to normal the minute there was someone else around for Ty to hang out with. He was just that kind of dude—the kind that can't be around two other people without trying to get one of them to help him trash the third guy. So it wasn't so much that he liked him better. It was more—well, it had sort of taken the fun out of hating him. It was, Rudy decided, a lot more fun to hate people you didn't know too much about.

So it turned out to be a very busy and active week, and the only problem with that was that Rudy didn't have much time to work on his own problems. He did get around to trying the “implosion” thing once more without much improvement, and another time he got into the storage closet up to his knees before he started freaking out. But that was about as good as it got.

It was around ten o'clock on Friday morning while Rudy was in the backyard watering Natasha's sweet peas that Murph came out on his back porch and invited Rudy to another chuck wagon breakfast.

“Kind of got carried away on the pancake batter this morning,” Murph said as Rudy came up the back steps. “You'd be doing me a big favor if you'd help me eat them up. Hate to have things go to waste.”

Good old Murph. Rudy's mouth was watering so much at the thought of Murph's famous pancakes that his drawl gurgled a little while he was doing his usual Windy Dayes response: “Waal, now, pardner. Don't mahnd if ah dew.”

The breakfast was terminally delicious, as always, and it wasn't until he'd finished his fourth pancake that they started talking.

“How's your book coming along?” Rudy began by asking, and Murph said “fine” and then went on to talk about a new treatment for agoraphobics that he'd recently heard about. And right after that Rudy surprised himself by saying, “Oh, yeah? That's funny, because I've been reading about treatments for phobias too.”

“You have?” Murph pushed back his plate and rested his elbows on the table.

“Yeah. It's really fascinating stuff. I checked out this book that's all about techniques doctors and psychologists have been using to treat people with all kinds of phobias.”

“Is that so?” Murph said. “Tell me about them.”

So Rudy did a long explanation of “implosion” and “progressive challenges” and “attitude readjustment,” and Murph listened very carefully with his eyes narrowed and his head nodding slightly from time to time. And when Rudy finally ran down, Murph said, “Yes, fascinating stuff, indeed. And does it work?”

“Work?” Rudy was surprised, but he was careful to sound even more surprised than he actually was. “I guess it does. The book said it worked really well on some patients.”

“Yes, but I mean, did it work when you tried it?”

“Oh,” Rudy said. “How did you—” He stopped and then decided to come clean—partially anyway. He shrugged. “Yeah, you guessed it. I tried out the ‘implosion' thing a little on this problem I have that's sort of like claustrophobia. Not exactly claustrophobia, but I just have this slightly nervous feeling sometimes when I get in a kind of tight place and…”

But the more he talked the more certain he became that Murph was waiting for him to tell him the real truth. And then, without even deciding to, he started telling Murph all about the times he'd had the screaming meemies and what had set them off, and the nightmares and how they'd been getting worse lately, and how he'd tried some of the treatments without making much progress. When he finally finished talking his hands felt a little shaky and there was a tightness beginning in his throat.

Murph was still nodding and staring at Rudy with his saggy old eyes looking so intent and focused that Rudy felt almost hypnotized, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car. And then Murph suddenly leaned forward, put his hand on Rudy's arm, and said, “Rudy, tell me. Just how much
do
you remember about being caught in the cave-in?”

Rudy's first reaction was amazement. No acting, no phony amazement. “Cave-in?” he started to say. “What cave-in? I don't remember anything about—” But he hadn't even finished the sentence when something started happening deep inside his head. Little flashes of scenes and sounds and memories, just like when you first wake up and keep getting brief glimpses from a dream before it all fades away. Darkness with a far-off light, strange sounds, creaks and thuds and crashes and muffled voices screaming his name. And then a heavy, smothering, dirty weight on his back and dirt on his face and in his mouth as he tried to scream.

He'd seen it many times before, those same brief frightening flashes, but he'd always thought of them as something left over from a dream. But this time they kept coming, longer and clearer until they began to be tied together, and the next thing he was aware of was being on his feet, pacing the floor with Murph beside him holding him by the shoulders and shaking him hard as they walked up and down the room.

It was Murph's shaking him that finally seemed to help, bringing him back to the present and Murph's kitchen and the taste of maple syrup in his mouth instead of the darkness and the dry, dead taste of sandy earth. At last Murph led him back to his chair and he sank into it. He put his head down on his arms and sat that way for a long time, shuddering so hard his shoulders jumped up and down and his feet jittered around under the chair as if they were trying to dance. It seemed like hours before the shuddering died away enough so that he was able to lift his head and ask Murph to tell him about it.

“You were five, I think,” Murph began. “Barney was sick with the measles, so you couldn't go to the Crooked Bar. Natasha was working. It wasn't long before Moira was born, but even so, your mother was working all day and you'd been left at home with your stepfather. But he'd gone off somewhere and left you alone. So I guess you'd gone out looking for someone to play with. And somehow you wound up out by the Jefferson Mine where some older boys were digging a tunnel in the tailings.”

“Steve,” Rudy said. It came out of nowhere, a name that yesterday he probably wouldn't have remembered, even if someone had mentioned it. Or even a few minutes ago. But now he could almost see him—a big kid, with a broad face and curly dark hair. “It was Steve's clubhouse we were digging. Steve said I could be in the club if I helped dig. Steve… Bowles.”

“Yes, it was the Bowles boys. Steve and the two younger brothers. Bigger kids than you, all of them, maybe eight to twelve years old. I don't recall the younger boys' names. They moved away from Pyramid soon afterward. I never did find out exactly how it happened, how you happened to be the only one caught when the framing they'd put up inside the tunnel collapsed and then the whole thing caved in. But when it happened the older boys started trying to dig you out while the youngest one ran to get your folks. But, of course, no one was home at your house and I happened to be out on my veranda…”

Rudy was surprised—and relieved—to feel a shaky smile start to curl the corners of his lips. “Studying…”

His voice shivered into silence, but Murph grinned and finished it for him. “Yes, studying humanity, quite likely. And so the Bowles boy found me instead and I grabbed a shovel and ran and …” He paused and then went on. “There was a big box in the tunnel that probably saved your life.”