Me and Fat Glenda. Lila Perl. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Lila Perl
Издательство: Ingram
Серия: Fat Glenda Series
Жанр произведения: Учебная литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781939601100
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for these things—and besides he’d already seen the big yard that surrounded the place. I guess he knew that this was going to be the house.

      The fat girl remained standing in the doorway, but I could tell from the way she didn’t seem much interested in looking around that she’d been in the house before.

      “It would be great to have somebody like you move into the neighborhood,” she said slowly, eyeing me in a funny way. “But you wouldn’t be thinking of moving in here, would you?”

      “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, trying to sound cool about it all. “It’s possible.”

      The girl exploded into a burst of laughter, although something about that laugh had a nasty ring to it, too.

      “Listen,” she said, sidling up to me in a confidential manner. “Nobody would move in here. This place is a dump. The last people that lived here were so awful they got run out of town.”

      “Why?”

      She grinned and tossed her head. “Never mind. I don’t tell neighborhood gossip.”

      “Then you shouldn’t have mentioned it in the first place.”

      “Listen,” the fat girl said, breathing heavily as she got even closer and went into a husky whisper. “The only kind of people who would ever rent or buy this place now is coloreds. That’s why my mother and these other neighbors have this committee. Get it?”

      I got it all right. But all I could see as I nodded dumbly was Inez’ face when she heard about this. Mom would be livid. She might even throw things. There were some things she could get pretty sore about and one of them was prejudice.

      For a minute I was tempted to tell the fat girl that my Mom was part American Indian and, therefore, so was I. And that was “colored,” wasn’t it? But I decided not to say anything about it just then.

      “Look,” I told her. “It’s up to my folks, whatever my Mom and Pop decide. They might just take the place. They’ve got their reasons.” Then I decided to get even with her for what she said earlier. “I can’t say anymore, though. I don’t tell family secrets.”

      She looked a little stunned but I could tell she caught on. For a second or two we just stood there glaring at one another.

      Then, all of a sudden, she broke out into a big picture-window smile. “Well,” she said, real warmly, “if you do move in here, I just know we’d be friends, huh? And I guess your folks would fix up the place so nobody’d ever even recognize it after a month or two.” She paused. “Oh, I s’pose I should introduce myself. I’m Glenda. Who are you?

      And that—as I guess you guessed already—is how I met Fat Glenda.

      That very same afternoon Drew and Inez and I drove to downtown Havenhurst to look up Mr. Calvin Creasey and see about renting the house. Of course, before that we had to drive back to “the box,” as Inez called the apartment, and pick her up and take her to see the house.

      At first she couldn’t believe it. But after we got there and I crawled in the living-room window again and unlocked the front door, Mom was really excited. She rushed all over the place from the basement to the third-floor attic.

      “You know,” she said in a confidential whisper to Pop and me, after she calmed down a little, “it’s spooky, absolutely spooky, to find a place as perfect as this.”

      Of course, anybody else’s mother would have screamed at how awful the kitchen was and would have had a fit about the rusty plumbing and the cracked tile in the bathroom. There were plenty of rooms, though. About ten or eleven, I guess, if you counted all the little funny-shaped ones, including the round one that was shaped like a sharpened pencil point and stuck up at the top of the house.

      After Mom finished looking around, Pop took her outside and showed her the yard and outlined some of his plans for where he would reassemble the two most important junk sculptures he had transported from California, and where he would pile his “raw materials.”

      They seemed to have everything figured out, and I only hoped they wouldn’t be disappointed when they went to see about renting the house. Drew must have been a little worried, too, because he kept warning Inez not to appear “too anxious” when they saw Mr. Creasey; that might make Mr. C. up the rent.

      The thing that kept bothering me the most was that, even though it was a nice sunny afternoon and there were houses all up and down the street, not a single person came in sight the whole time we were there. Anybody would have known we were looking at the house for the second time that day because of the garbage truck parked out in front. Yet nobody showed up, not even Glenda.

      All the way to Mr. Creasey’s office, Inez kept humming and eating raw mushrooms from the bagful she’d gathered that morning on her bicycle trip to the woods. Every other mushroom out of the bag, she popped into Drew’s mouth while he drove. Luckily, I had just had a chance to slap an L-burger together when we went home to get Inez and I was eating that now, cold. I know I said I couldn’t go on with the alphabet-burgers after sharing K-burgers with Toby at our last meal together, but I guess the prospect of having a friend again had cheered me up, and anyhow the L was sitting around handy at the moment.

      Finding Mr. Creasey took a little while. We got to the old business section in Havenhurst all right and found 108 Broadway. It was an upstairs office over a hardware store that still had advertisements for barnyard feed in the window and rolls of chicken-coop wire for sale out front.

      The stairway up to Mr. Creasey’s office was so dusty that our shoes left prints on the steps. At the top, the sign lettered on the door said that Mr. Creasey was a lawyer, realtor, county clerk, insurance agent, tax consultant, private detective, and notary public.

      Drew turned the knob, which squeaked as though it was hurting. The door opened with a groan and we all walked in. Mr. Creasey was nowhere in sight, nor was anybody else. There was a big desk with papers and ledgers on it, all covered with dust, and some old chairs with cracked leather seats and oatmeal-colored stuffing peeking out. In the corner there was a long row of dark green metal filing cabinets, standing about six feet high.

      While Drew talked in an unnaturally loud voice to try to attract someone’s attention, Inez stalked around the office looking for cobwebs. Not that Inez was finicky about things like that or ever did “white glove” tests in other people’s houses—not Inez. No, it was just that Mom really loved cobwebs and she knew right away that this was a good place to hunt for some. Back in California, she had never let anybody brush away cobwebs or even kill spiders for that matter.

      “Because cobwebs are nature’s original designs and can give you the most wonderful ideas,” she had once explained. “Like snowflakes, no two are ever alike.” When she found a cobweb, she would draw its patterns on a piece of paper and put it away for her designs in hand-blocking or batik-making or weaving or whatever she was excited about at the moment.

      Now Mom was crouching down, her eyes level with the top of Mr. Creasey’s desk (she had spotted a terrific cobweb that looped across from one of the big ledgers to the top of an inkwell) when there was a sharp, crunching noise from behind the file cabinets.

      Drew stiffened and said, “Mr. Creasey?” in an extremely loud voice. It was the kind of voice a person uses when he thinks there are burglars in the house and hopes there aren’t. I just stood there with my knees turning to jelly and my fingers to ice. I didn’t know if Drew or Inez had seen it but, along the tops of the file cabinets, I distinctly saw something very peculiar and very much alive bobbing up and down, and slowly moving toward us

      A second later, a man stepped out from behind the file cabinets. He was tall with sloping shoulders, a long wrinkled white face, ash-colored hair, and horn-rimmed eyeglasses. On his head he wore a dark-green eyeshade, like a baseball cap with no top.

      “Sorry to have kept you waiting so long,” he said in a deep mellow