The Book of Bright Ideas Read online

  “Button doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as fairies,” Winnalee said. “But I told her anything’s possible.”

  I wanted to say something, but instead I just made that noise in my throat.

  Aunt Verdella smiled with her lips closed, her head tipped to the side. “Oh, that’s so true, Winnalee. Think of that Shepard man who went right up into space earlier this month. Who would have ever thought that we could send a man up there? But we did! I’ve always said that we’ve got to go on thinking anything’s possible. Or else what’s the point?”

  Once me and Winnalee were outside, I told her—same as I did the day before—that there wasn’t any such thing as fairies. “Fairies are just folklore. I learned about folklore in third grade.”

  Winnalee hoisted her ma up in her arms and gave a big sigh. “Course there’s such a thing as fairies! I read about them in a book that was left in the attic of this one house we lived in last summer. It was an old book. Stinky old, the pages all crunchy. It was written by that very same man who wrote those Sherlock Holmes stories my ma used to read. It was called The Coming of the Fairies.”

  Winnalee headed across the lawn and I followed her. She stopped a second to peer at the Virgin lady in the bathtub, then kept walking. “It was a real story that happened by this place they called Cottingley Beck.”

  “Where’s that?” I asked, and Winnalee shrugged. “Anyway, this girl and her cousin, they used to play by this water where there were fairies. The little girl, her name was Frances, and her cousin—well, I don’t remember her name—anyway, one day they took a couple of pictures of the fairies. The pictures were in the book too, right there to see with your very own eyes.”

  “You have the book?”

  “No, course I don’t! That one was a real book, so if I’d taken it, that would have been stealing.” She stopped till I stopped, then cupped her hand beside her mouth and leaned over to my ear. “But I did rip a page out, with one of the pictures on it.”

  “You still got it?”

  “Yeah. In my shoe box. That’s the surprise I’m gonna show you today.”

  So we headed over to Grandma Mae’s house—which I decided right then I’d start calling “Winnalee’s house” from now on.

  We were just starting to cross the road when Tommy’s black truck came rumbling down it in a cloud of dust. We ran as fast as we could—because it didn’t look like he was going to stop—but it wasn’t easy to go fast, because Winnalee was barefoot and the rocks on the road were hurting her feet. I got scared when Tommy’s truck swerved like it was an arrow and we were the bull’s-eye. I grabbed Winnalee’s arm and yanked her along till we got to the grass, her ouching all the way. Tommy’s truck braked fast, so that the back part bucked sideways some.

  “Don’t you kiddies know to get out of the way when somethin’s coming? That’s a good way to get your guts splattered.” He was grinning so that his vampire teeth were showing.

  “Come on, Winnalee,” I said, but she ignored me.

  Tommy spit out the window, then licked his skinny lip where some of the spit was sitting. He looked at the urn, then over at the house. “Where’s that sister of yours?”

  “Freeda? How do you know my sister?”

  Tommy leaned his arm on the window and took a peek at himself in that little mirror sticking out of the driver’s door. “Well, in this town, word of a newcomer spreads faster than the stink of a fart. Especially when one of ’em is good-looking and stacked. Heard about you too and how you carry your dead ma around with you.” He squinted his eyes at Winnalee’s urn. “That her?”

  Winnalee was swaying from side to side, like there was music playing in her head and she was wanting to dance. “Yeah. You wanna see her?”

  Tommy’s piggy nose scrinched up. “Don’t think so.”

  He bent his arm and scratched at the dirty, dry patch of skin over his elbow. “You’re a creepy kid, you know that?” He glanced at the house again, then back at us. “She’s creepy too,” he said, lifting one finger to point at me. “The way she’s always watching people so close; never saying what she’s thinkin’.”

  “We’re going to look for fairies,” Winnalee said, ignoring his comments. I put my hands behind my back and squeezed them tight. I knew Tommy was gonna make fun of us for playing such a baby game.

  “Is that right?”

  “We have to find a beck first, though. You know where there’s one around here?”

  I could tell by the way his snaky eyebrows scrinched in the shape of an S that he didn’t have a clue what a beck was. Winnalee must have known this too, because she added, “That’s a brook, I think. A little stream. I ain’t sure, though.”

  Tommy gave one of those laughs that comes out half like a grunt. “I know that. What, you think I’m stupid?” He cocked his head, then pointed out past Winnalee’s new house. “See that field there? If you cross it, duck right into that patch of white pine, straight west about three-quarters of a mile or so, you’ll come right to a little stream that sits between Peters land and the Fossard property.”

  Tommy grinned at me after he said this, and I started biting the inside of my cheek.

  “There’s fairies at that creek too. Little fairy ladies with pearly wings. Pretty little dresses on ’em too. Lots of folks have seen ’em there. Course, you have to catch them right before dark, I hear.”

  Winnalee lit up, her eyes getting all round and sparkly. She hoisted her ma up higher in her arms.

  One of Tommy’s eyebrows scooted up, and the other one crouched down. “Course, you’ll be takin’ a chance on running into Fossard’s ghost.”

  “Ghost?”

  “Yep. Ask Button here about Hiram Fossard’s ghost. She’ll tell ya. He was the grave digger over at the commie cemetery, where the old atheists got buried. He was a skinny old guy, with a big ol’ hump on his back. Couldn’t even straighten up if he wanted to after spending so many years bent over, digging graves. He was crazy as a loon too. So scared of those Soviets nuking us that he dug himself a bomb shelter. Cut it right into that hill by his house with the very shovel that he dug the commies’ graves with. Put a cot in there, a water barrel, guns, food, you name it.”

  “Lots of people have bomb shelters,” Winnalee said. “That don’t make them crazy.”

  Tommy nodded in quick little jerks. “Yep, that’s right. But I ain’t saying that’s why he was nuts. It wasn’t. He was nuts because he was so damn worried about those nuke bombs that he couldn’t sleep nights. Stayed up around the clock in time, days on end, pacing and watching the sky, waiting for the big one to drop.

  “Course, the nutty bastard was just as scared of being stuck underground too. So it weren’t long before he couldn’t get his mind off of being stuck under that hill of dirt if the Soviets did shit on us and he ended up trapped in that shelter. Worked himself into such a tizzy that one night he shot his dog and his wife, then he hanged himself from a tree.”

  Tommy cocked his head to one side and yanked on an imaginary rope around his neck. He made choking noises as his tongue flapped out of the side of his mouth. He laughed some, then dropped his voice down real quiet and leaned his ugly head farther out of the window. “His ghost still won’t go into the ground. Walks all night long—and sometimes in the day too—pacing, still waitin’ for the Soviets to come, that shovel he always carried scuffing behind him as he drags it across the ground. People who dare go there—looking for fairies, most likely—they all hear it.”

  Scared started swirling in my belly. I looked over at Winnalee, but she didn’t look sick with fright at all. She just tugged her ma up again and lifted her head up a bit higher. “You’re just trying to scare us. You think if you do, we’ll be too afraid to go there to see the fairies. But you’re not so smart after all. I ain’t scared of dead people. If I was, you think I’d carry my dead ma with me wherever I go?”

  I was real glad when Aunt Verdella leaned out the porch door just then, calling to Tommy, telling him where he could fi
nd Uncle Rudy. He waved to Aunt Verdella so she knew he’d heard her, then looked back at me and Winnalee. “I gotta get to work. I ain’t got time to be sitting here talking to a couple of little kids.” He put the truck in gear and it lurched forward, heading toward the driveway that led to the barn.

  “Button, you going over to Winnalee’s?”

  I yelled back that I was.

  “Okay, sweetie. But don’t you go anywhere else. Auntie Verdella needs to know where you are.”

  As we walked across the lawn, Winnalee was all excited about going on an adventure to see those fairies. It was enough to make me start gnawing on the inside of my cheek.

  “Aunt Verdella’d never let me go that far, Winnalee,” I said. “She’s always worried that I’m gonna get lost. I can’t even leave the yard. And anyway, Tommy’s nothing but a big liar. How do we know we could really find Fossard’s property by going straight through the woods? And I’ll bet if we did find it, there wouldn’t be any fairies there anyway, because fairies aren’t real.”

  As we walked up the porch steps, Winnalee shook her head. “Button, I told you. Anything’s possible. You never know. Now come on, so I can show you that picture and prove to you that fairies exist.”

  I followed Winnalee through the house, and when we passed Freeda’s bedroom to get to the stairs, I could see Freeda stretched across her bed in her underwear, the morning sun resting over her naked back. She was asleep, one pale arm dangling over the edge of the bed, her penny hair dripped over the side. “She was out last night, then came home with some guy,” Winnalee said. “He left the toilet seat up, and I didn’t see it when I got up in the night to pee. I got my butt wet too. Freeda said she’ll pick up a night-light. I told her why don’t she just make her stupid boyfriends put the damn seat down instead. Anyway, she ain’t gonna get outta bed at least till noon—I can tell you that much. And you don’t have to worry about making noise either, because she don’t hear nothing when she’s sleeping.”

  I followed Winnalee into her room, where she put her ma on the window seat, then opened the closet and disappeared inside. She came out with her shoe box. She dug out the folded page of the book, then brought it over to the bed that wasn’t made, and we sat down.

  She unfolded the page and laid it on the lap of her mesh skirt, which was scratching my bare leg and practically hogging up the whole bed. “See?”

  “Holy moly!” I said, as I took the picture from her lap. I probably looked stupid with my mouth hanging wide open and my eyes all bugged out, but I couldn’t help it. I ran my fingers over the glossy page where an old-fashioned girl was propped on a bank. Right in front of her were beautiful little fairies, their bare legs and arms dancing, their wings pointing up to heaven. “Wow!”

  “See, I told you! Wish we had a camera to take pictures with when we find them.”

  I was thinking hard now. Thinking about how when Winnalee first told me that she had her ma in that jar, I didn’t believe her then either, but it was true. Now here I was looking at pictures of fairies. I was having a hard time believing my own eyes, but maybe, just maybe, Winnalee was telling the truth this time too.

  The thought of maybe seeing real live fairies made my belly start dancing. But then I thought of seeing Fossard’s ghost, and suddenly it felt like my belly danced too close to a cliff and fell right off in one whoosh. “I won’t be able to go all that ways, Winnalee. I told you. You heard Aunt Verdella tell me not to go anywhere else. She’d spy us before we even reached the edge of the field, so we can just forget about running off to find fairies today.”

  Winnalee took the picture and folded it back up. “I don’t mean today, Button. You can’t go out on a big adventure without thinking everything out first. We have to make plans. We need a map, food, things like that. Then we’ll have to wait for just the right chance to sneak away.”

  My arms stopped itching when she said we didn’t have to go yet.

  5

  One thing I thought about while I sat in the Malones’ kitchen with Freeda and Aunt Verdella, while Winnalee splashed and sang in the tub (her first bath since she moved in, even though we’d gotten plenty dirty in the nine days since she got here), was how families are all different. At my house, it was quiet. So quiet that if Ma let a mouse slip inside (which she wouldn’t), I was sure you could hear him breathing. Even when the TV set was on (which wasn’t often), you had to scoot so close to it to hear anything that you had to worry about ruining your eyes.

  Our house was clean too, with everything having a place and everyone having rules they had to follow. The towels all had to match, and after you used one, you had to fold it neat so that the hems hung straight like pictures. And nobody talked much, and nobody laughed, and nobody cried, and nobody touched anybody.

  At Aunt Verdella and Uncle Rudy’s, it was noisy all the time. The TV was going from the time they woke up till the time they went to bed—even if nobody was watching it, and even if that was wasting electricity. It was always turned up loud too. So loud that I was sure that if I ran to the end of the field, I’d still be able to hear the soap-opera people talking, and Aunt Verdella talking at them, or at Uncle Rudy. And the towels in the bathroom were folded over the rack, but if the hems hung crooked like bangs cut wrong, then that was okay. And if one of those towels was plain pink, and one green striped, and another one was busy with flowers, then that was okay too, because that was pretty like a rainbow. And there wasn’t no special place to put anything either, so we spent a lot of time digging under mounds of yarn, old mail, or clothes that were folded but not put away yet for whatever it was we needed.

  At the Malones’, though, it was different still. Sometimes it was real noisy, with music playing so loud you could feel it thumping in your chest. But other times, like when Freeda was sleeping and Winnalee was drawing, it was as quiet in their house as it was in ours. The towels were usually left on the floor, or bunched up with just a wadded corner tucked over the towel rack. And sometimes they matched, and sometimes they didn’t. And there was lots of yelling and cussing, and even slapping now and then, but there was lots of laughing and hugging too.

  “That sure is a cute top,” I heard Aunt Verdella say, so I stopped thinking and looked at the skinny, sleeveless blouse hanging over the back of a chair she was pointing to. “I wish I could wear things like that.”

  “Why can’t you?” Freeda asked, as she ripped open a bag of Windmill cookies and ate a blade off of one. “I say, if you’ve got it, flaunt it.” Freeda stretched out her arms and shimmied as she whooped.

  “Oh good heavens,” Aunt Verdella said with a laugh. “I’m fifty-eight years old and fat, that’s why. Imagine how silly I’d look in something like that!” She giggled some more.

  “Ah, piss,” Freeda said, as she leaned back on her chair. She propped her feet up and hooked her long toes on the edge of the table. “If people don’t like it, they can lump it. People should wear what they want, and do what they want. That’s what I say. When I’m your age, I’m gonna wear whatever I damn please. And I’m gonna grow my hair all the way down to my ass too, and let it hang wild, just to piss off people who think that older women should have short hair. Just watch me.”

  Aunt Verdella giggled, then said, “I’ve no doubt you’ll do exactly those things!”

  “You want one, kid?” Freeda asked, tapping the cookie bag with the edge of her foot.

  I kind of wanted one. Not because I liked the way they tasted, but because I liked the way they looked, but I couldn’t make myself say yes.

  Freeda popped the rest of her cookie in her mouth. She leaned forward and took another one out of the package, then flicked it across the table. It spun, then stopped when it bumped against my hand. I picked it up and chewed it with little bites.

  Freeda set down her cup and, without excusing herself, shuffled into the bathroom on bare feet. She didn’t even close the door behind her, even though we could see her drop her drawers and hear her piddling. I watched but tried to make it
look like I wasn’t. I saw drops of bathwater shoot sideways at her. She put her hands in front of her face, and her top part darted from side to side, like one of those fat-faced, poisonous snakes that dance when you play them music on a flute. “Goddammit, Winnalee. You stop that right now!”

  Winnalee giggled, and Aunt Verdella turned to look. She giggled too.

  “I mean it, you little shit, or I’ll drown you when I’m off of here!” Winnalee kept flicking water till Freeda wiped, pulled up her pants, and ran out of the room.

  “What a kid!” Freeda said, as she rolled her eyes.

  Aunt Verdella turned and caught her reflection in the chrome toaster. She started picking at her hair. “You could get by with having your hair long when you’re older, but not me. Oh, look at this frizzy mess. I’ve colored it so many times, I don’t even remember what color it was before I started!”

  While Aunt Verdella talked, I could feel Freeda staring at me. I set my half-eaten cookie down on the table and slipped my hands up over my ears—wishing my hands were as big as Uncle Rudy’s so I could cover my knotty curls too.

  “You like your hair like that, Button?” Freeda asked. I could tell by the way she asked it that she wouldn’t like her hair to look like mine. Her eyes peered at me from over her coffee cup while she waited for my answer. I could feel my cheeks heat up.

  “I didn’t think so,” she said. She set her cup down. “I’ve seen the way you look at Winnalee’s hair. Hey, next time your ma gets out her scissors and that stupid perm kit, you just tell her, ‘Fuck it, I’m not getting my hair whacked and fried. I’m letting it grow long like Winnalee’s.’ Then run like hell.”

  Aunt Verdella gasped. “Freeda!”

  Freeda laughed and got up. She went to the stove and grabbed the percolator off it, put her finger on the glass knob on top, then tipped it sideways to refill her cup. “Ah, don’t get your butt in a bundle, Verdella. That kid ain’t gonna repeat what I just said. Look at her. She’s so uptight she can’t even say she wants a frickin’ cookie without biting half of her face off, much less how she wants to wear her hair.”