Drew kept staring out the rear windows of the apartment.
“That does it,” he said after awhile. “We won’t unpack.”
“Oh, I’m glad to hear you say that,” Inez exclaimed.
Drew kept right on staring out the window and shaking his head in disbelief and disappointment. “I thought there’d be a big expanse of ground back there, a place where a person could do a little construction. There’s nothing. Just a roadway directly behind the buildings and then a string of garages.”
“We’ll camp,” Inez said excitedly. “We won’t unpack. We’ll just camp, right here in the—ugh—apartment. And we’ll go scouting every day. There must be real towns around here somewhere, with real houses in them. I thought I spotted a few rustic-looking places after we left the Expressway this morning. There are three weeks to go before classes begin and before school starts for Sara. I’m sure we’ll find some place to live.”
And there was Mom consoling Pop as though he’d been the one to practically throw a temper tantrum at the start. Of course all this talk about to-unpack-or-not-to-unpack was silly. The apartment was already pretty full of furniture and there was no attic or basement or backyard shed, so how could we unload looms and zithers and iron spikes from the Union Pacific Railroad? We just brought in our clothes and got ready to spend a couple of nights there, just as though we were still traveling across the U.S. on our way to somewhere.
Next day Pop got some maps of the nearby towns around the college and talked to a few people, and the administration office said they’d give him an allotment equal to the rent of the apartment toward the monthly rental of any house he found. Which meant the house had to be for rent at a pretty cheap price.
After about three days of cruising around in the nearby towns, Drew had to go get more maps. Most of the houses close to the college were already rented or owned by the college professors who had long-term contracts. Those that were left were either too expensive or else they were egg crates.
Inez said it wouldn’t matter even if we moved to a town that was ten or fifteen miles away from the campus, since Drew would have the truck for daily transportation. She herself always used a bicycle for shopping and other errands.
One thing we found out from driving slowly through a lot of small town streets is that people are always glad to see the garbage man. Even though Drew had washed down the truck and it was now back to being filthy white and dirty yellow with big black letters that said it belonged to PINE RIDGE TOWNSHIP in California, you’d be surprised how many people came running out of their houses with bags of garbage as soon as they heard us coming.
One little old lady raced out with a whole bedsheet full of watermelon peels and cantaloupe rinds.
“My, I’m glad you came by this afternoon,” she said brightly. “Not one of your regular pickups, is it? Well, you couldn’t have picked a better time. I’m just putting up my watermelon pickle and I’m so glad to be getting rid of the garbage today before the weekend comes on. Bedsheet’s old, too, so I thought that might as well go. You won’t be coming by again a little later, will you? I’ll have shrimp shells.”
She looked almost ready to cry, standing there on the sidewalk with her torn, bulging bedsheet, after Pop told her we weren’t taking any garbage, only looking for a nice roomy house to rent.
On the other hand, Drew picked up some fantastic junk, even though he had expected the pickings to be slim in the East. One man who had some big black stovepipes sitting out on the sidewalk flagged us down and then asked if we’d like to take a peek in his garage. Inez got a couple of enormous old tubs and dye pots out of that one and also a lyre with three strings missing.
But although junk kept piling up in the truck, we didn’t seem to be getting any closer to finding a place where we would be able to unload it all. By now we were looking around in a town called Havenhurst, about fourteen miles from the college. Like most of the towns we had looked through, it had a mixture of old houses and new houses, a dilapidated old shopping street called Broadway, and a whopping big, neon-lit shopping center called the Havenhurst Shoppers Mall.
We were grinding past a spread-out new ranch house with manicured grass and a red-and-white painted jockey on the lawn when a girl came running down the driveway, all the time yelling over her shoulder, “Hey Ma, the garbage man!”
Only Drew and I were in the truck that day. Inez had gone bicycling to a patch of woods on the north edge of the campus to hunt for mushrooms.
“Step on it,” I said to Pop. “It’s garbage this time for sure. Judging from the size of that kid, they eat a lot in that house.”
Because this girl was fat. And when I say fat, I don’t mean fat. I mean FAT.
“Hey wait, mister,” the fat girl yelled, puffing her way toward us like a steam engine. “Please wait.” And to my surprise, Drew began slowing to a stop. Not because of her, but because just ahead of us at the corner of the street, half hidden by trees, sat an old silvery gray wooden house in the middle of a weed-grown yard and surrounded by a fence with a lot of the pickets missing. And nailed to the fence was a big, tired-looking sign that said THIS PROPERTY FOR SALE OR RENT: INQUIRE CALVIN CREASEY, 108 BROADWAY, HAVENHURST.
By now the fat girl was peering up into the cab of the truck, her cheeks and chin still shaking like jelly from that exhausting run down the driveway and along the street to the truck, maybe a whole twelve yards.
“Gee thanks for waiting, mister,” she gasped up at Drew. “My mother’ll be out in a minute. See, we missed the pickup yesterday and our Dispose-all’s on the blink.”
“Forget it,” I said, leaning over Pop’s shoulder to save him the trouble for once. “We don’t take garbage.”
“You don’t?” She looked pretty mad. Her hair, which was blonde and crinkly, seemed to stand up on end and her eyes, which were the same light hazel color as the freckles all over her cheeks, seemed to turn about three shades darker. She wasn’t bad-looking and I figured she must have been just about my age—eleven, or maybe twelve. But as I said before, was she ever FAT.
“Then what are you riding around in a garbage truck for?” she wanted to know.
“That’s our business,” Drew snapped. He was getting tired of explanations, and what with school opening for me in just one week and classes starting at the college very soon after, the whole thing was getting to be a drag.
“It’s a long story,” I said apologetically.
“Listen,” Drew said wearily to the fat girl. “What can you tell us about that house, the one there on the corner with the FOR RENT sign?”
She followed Drew’s gaze. “That house. Oh, that’s the old Creasey place. Isn’t it awful? No one lives there now. In fact there’s a neighborhood committee to get it condemned and torn down. My mother’s the chairman,” she added proudly.
“Well congratulations and all that,” Pop said.
“But how can we get a look at it? I mean now. Without going back to Broadway and hunting down this Mr. Creasey.”
The fat girl looked at Drew and then slyly shifted her eyes to me. “Well, it’s locked—I guess . . . I mean, it’s still private property. But if someone could crawl through a window. Well, of course, I couldn’t—uh, that is, I wouldn’t. But sometimes some of the neighborhood kids do, the smaller kids, that is. . .”
It took only a few minutes for me to crawl through the living-room window, walk across the creaky dusty floorboards of the