The Hole in the Wall Read online

  From Kettle Ridge you could actually see the triangle shape, like a giant wedge had been cut into the earth. The ridge rose straight up at the widest end, with the stripped land gradually narrowing to a tip a couple of miles away. The Gash cut across the wedge diagonally from near our house to the center of town. If you knew where to look, you could make out a camouflaged bump in the middle of the triangle. That was the ORC compound.

  The sight of Odum’s triangle of wasteland made a crappy start to the school day. Much better to look out the right side where ORC hadn’t turned nature into an ashtray. Off to the right, the land looked the way the gore used to—rolling hills with big old trees and boulders wherever the land hadn’t been cleared for gardens or homes. Pretty. Lots of wildlife. Turkeys had often wandered through Grum’s backyard with their heads bobbing. They made me laugh. And Pa did, too, when he used to take me and Jed trout fishing in the brook out behind Grum’s, telling us the adventures he and little Stanley Odum had while growing up in the gore.

  No fish in that brook now.

  As soon as I strapped myself in next to Rico, I knocked three times on Barbie’s head. “Hello, can I borrow a pencil?”

  “Quit it! Only if you aren’t going to ask me to forge Ma’s signature.”

  “I can’t believe you’d even think that. Can I borrow your math?”

  “Do your own math.”

  “What if I pay you?”

  “You don’t have anything I want.”

  Oh, didn’t I! Wouldn’t she love to know about my hideout, the Hole in the Wall. Barbie would have to give me her math and sign Ma’s signature every day for a year to make it worth sharing my best secret with her. I went there every chance I could sneak away from the house.

  “You know the deal,” she said. “You give me your shoe, I give you my pencil.” This was so I’d remember to give her the pencil back. Usually when I stepped in a mud puddle. Which was often. We got a lot of rain in Kokadjo.

  “Aw, c’mon, do I have to?”

  “You’d lose your own belly button if it wasn’t tucked in. Your shoe or no pencil.”

  No choice. I threw my holey sneaker into her lap.

  As Barbie dug for a pencil I leaned over Rico and let him pull on my curls so I could watch for Cluster Dogstar to emerge from the woods on the right. It was better than looking the other way and getting all depressed.

  Cluster Dogstar, the new kid in eighth grade, was the only one besides me and Barbie who rode the Rust Bus. Her parents used to homeschool her until Cluster crossed her arms and said, “I’m never going to read another word or multiply another number or speak to you ever again unless you put me in a school with other kids, and you can’t make me change my mind.” Then she clamped her lips shut and waited for September. On her first day of school she discovered computers, and she didn’t want to go home.

  The Dogstars all had weird names. Blue Moon was Cluster’s unexpected baby brother, Marigold was her mother, and Goldenrod was her father. Marigold had changed her name from Mary Jane, and Goldenrod had changed his name from Rodney, but Cluster and Blue Moon were the kids’ real names.

  Cluster walked like a deer, picking her steps carefully. Which made her more fun to watch than doing fractions. Maybe she just did that because the path she walked had actually been made by deer. There wasn’t a driveway to her house. I’d never been inside, but everyone knew that the log cabin where the Dogstars lived didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing. At least I had a television to watch, even if Pa hogged it, and I could brush my teeth over the sink when Grum wasn’t in the bathroom. Sebastian wasn’t a great name, but it wasn’t Blue Moon.

  “Peace, my friends.” Here she was, floating into the Rust Bus like an apple blossom in the wind. Cluster always talked like a grown-up flower child, and she always seemed to be floating like some kind of petal.

  “My goodness, Sebastian, you are looking upright this morning,” Cluster said.

  “Yeah, it must be all that cold milk I drink,” I said. “What’s new with you?”

  “We already had a visitor at the Love Shack this morning.” Cluster called their house the Love Shack. People in town called their place Zensylvania or just “the commune.” Pa called them whacked-out yippie-hippie-doo-da-dopeheads and told me and Barbie to stay away from there.

  I hoped the visitor was someone interesting. Like the longhair with sandals who had started hiking from British Columbia to join the commune thirty years ago and just showed up last August. For the most part, though, more people left than arrived at Zensylvania (especially A.O., After Odum). Now it was pretty much down to the Dogstars, that longhair guy, and a bunch of goats.

  Not surprisingly, Cluster said, “A representative from Odum Research Corporation came to test our water again.”

  The Dogstars got their water from a pure spring, and they bottled and sold their Zenwater to health food stores. Last fall, their dog Red Dwarf had suddenly gotten sick and died. The veterinarian said the cause was something Red Dwarf ate or drank. Cluster’s parents went to town and knocked on Mr. Stanley Odum’s door. Nobody except them knew what was said, but the next day Cluster told us some of Odum’s goons showed up to put a fancy water purification system into their spring. (Well, she actually said some “representatives” showed up. At our house, we called those people “Odum’s Goons.”)

  While they were at it, the goons brought one for our well too.

  “Wasn’t that generous of my old buddy Stan to give us that high falutin’ H2O gadget for free?” said Pa. Like most people in town, he gushed over Stanley Odum like he was some kind of hero when he opened up the Stanley T. Odum Zoo and the Boys of Summer Stadium.

  “So generous that he doesn’t want us to get sick off his polluted runoff and sue him,” Jed said.

  Those two had a difference of opinion over everything. If Pa said sneakers, Jed said sandals. If Jed said blue, Pa said red. And arguments over Odum could go on for hours.

  “Of course Stan doesn’t want us to sue him,” Pa said. “He doesn’t want anyone to sue him, ergo he does the right thing. That’s how the free market is supposed to work. It’s the American way.”

  “Yep,” Jed said, “that’s the Corporate States of American way, all right. Put your childhood buddy out of business and then refuse him a job as a lousy janitor in your stinking rich company. Good guy, that Odum.”

  Jed was talking about the time Pa went to apply for a maintenance job at ORC and couldn’t get past the front gate because he flunked the employment test. Actually he couldn’t even take the test because it was digital. And Pa wasn’t.

  “Teenagers. You think you know it all when you have no idea what you’re talking about. Stan’s not a bad guy. He’d have hired me if he could. It’s not his fault I don’t know how to use all that technocrapola he’s got over there.”

  “There is such a thing as retraining, Pa. Education. If your generous benefactor didn’t see fit to provide that for all the schmucks who did things the old-fashioned way before he took over the town, then at least you could get yourself back to school and learn how to function in the world we’re actually living in today.”

  With arguments like that overflowing in our little house, I didn’t know what to think about Odum. Good guy, bad guy, which was he?

  “Oh, Mr. Odum is neither one nor the other. He’s human. He’s both good and bad.”

  I snapped my head toward the voice beside me. Cluster Dogstar in the Rust Bus. Yikes, had I been talking out loud? I thought I was just thinking to myself! Or had Cluster read my mind? I wouldn’t put that past her. I snapped my head the other direction to look for clues on Rico’s face. He had his toe in his mouth.

  “So how did the water test turn out?” I asked Cluster.

  She shrugged. “They just took a sample. We’ll find out the results later today.”

  “Do you think there’s a reason they keep checking? Something they know is wrong?” Jed would think that.

  “I really can’t say.”
/>   What was that supposed to mean? Did Cluster not know, or did she know something she wasn’t allowed to tell? I’d have asked her if she didn’t already have one leg out the door. By now we had reached the Mildew School, and the only thing Cluster had on her mind was going online.

  The Mildew School was my name for our branch of the Stanley T. Odum Education Center because of the way it turned gray no matter how often they repainted. The superintendent said the problem kept recurring because the building was situated over a high water table in the valley and had big shade trees growing around it. But I didn’t remember the school ever being gray before the strip mine. Everything in town turned gray no matter what. When it was wet, the mildew grew. When it was dry, the dust settled. Gray, gray, gray. Pa said everyone should just paint everything gray and stop whining about it.

  I hopped to sixth grade homeroom on one foot pretending I was a stork, then quickly finished scribbling my math so I could get my sneaker back. I even felt pretty good about a couple of the answers. Not Ms. Byron. She shook her head sadly as she handed my page back, with a tiny red zero in the corner like a swatted gnat. I wondered if giving bad grades hurt Ms. Byron more than it hurt us.

  “Sebastian, you’re obviously having some trouble with numbers. You did page 127 instead of 238. How about you and I stay after school and get you caught up?”

  The class thought that was very funny. But Grum says there’s always a bright side, and there was. At least now I had a good excuse to walk home. It was only a mile if I cut across the gore, and I could go straight to the Hole in the Wall instead of having to slip through the clutches of Grum and Pa. They always had their own ideas about how I should spend my time.

  That afternoon after doing page 238 (and 230, and all the pages in between) I zipped down the block to the IGA on Main Street. Behind the garbage dumpsters out back a big old tree had broken during an ice storm and left a branch leaning over the tall fence that surrounded the gore. That branch was how I got in A.O. on the town side. On the home side, I slipped between two gigantic boulders they hadn’t crammed together closely enough to stop me and my bike.

  You wouldn’t use either the front or the back gates if you wanted to sneak around ORC, since both were guarded by goons with guns. The roads all had lampposts with surveillance cameras on top looking around like birds of prey, and they broadcast menacing caw-caw-caw noises to keep real birds from nesting there.

  To me those caws translated to a challenge: “Dare you to sneak by! Dare! Dare!” How could I resist? Besides, I was getting bored snooping around Zensylvania. The most exciting thing I’d ever seen there was Marigold hanging diapers on the clothesline. No, wait, it was when I climbed one of their trees in the winter and could see in our kitchen window. I caught Grum waltzing with a mop.

  Poking around inside the gore wasn’t anything like looking down on it from Kettle Ridge. It was still disgusting, in concept, but being in the middle of it was also very, very interesting. After two years of sneaking I knew the gore inside out. Well, everything that wasn’t inside the Onion, anyway. The inner compound was a lichen-green dome half buried in the middle of the triangle like a gigantic overripe onion. If you looked down on it from a plane, it would blend in with the ground so you wouldn’t even know it was there. To find it you’d have to practically bump into it, like I did the first year of the mining.

  It had been a cold day in November, before the first snow. One second I was combing for rocks, and the next second I was staring through an electric fence that seemed to pop up out of nowhere. A big barking blur of black was coming at me. It was a hungry Doberman, and there were more where he came from. If not for the fence I’d have been Kibbles ’n Bits. Luckily my surge of terror adrenaline got me out of there before the goons could catch me.

  After that I went back and found a slag pile where I could spy from a distance without getting the Dobermans stirred up from their underground kennels. Mornings when I didn’t have school I borrowed Grum’s binoculars and hid there. I saw how the goons scanned their hands in front of an electric eye to make the gate open, and then how they disappeared into a tunnel that led to some underground parking area. The compound had to be huge under there. I watched bulldozers, backhoes, and dump trucks go back and forth day after day, bringing big rock chunks back to the compound and hauling loads of dirt and gravel back out.

  Why did they pulverize all those rocks? It really bothered me. Because I liked rocks. Loved rocks. I even collected ones that looked like something—a heart, a frog, the state of Maine. Called them my art rocks. What was ORC mining that they had to ruin all those rocks? And why hide their big secret underground?

  I was dying to get inside that place and find out, so I decided it would be a good idea to make friends with the Dobermans. Maybe they’d let me sneak inside through their kennels. They were very skinny, and I thought they’d love to have some home cooking, even if it was Ma’s. But my plan had to wait for winter to end so I wouldn’t leave footprints in the snow.

  The first spring night after a big thaw, I sneaked the leftovers out of the fridge and took them as close to the electric fence as I dared. We’d had hockey puckburgers for dinner. I flung them over the top, and sure enough, the dogs came running. You’d think they’d pounce on the hamburgers and wag their tails in thanks, but no. They didn’t even stop to sniff. They just stood at the fence barking their faces into froth. I knew from one time I’d seen the dogs bark at a lost skunk that a pack of goons would be running up out of the kennels in about ten seconds with guns cocked. I made dust out of there. I was Robin Hood escaping the Sheriff of Nottingham, just running without thinking of where I was going, scrambling up and down piles of slag.

  And that was how I stumbled onto my secret place. Tripped over a tree root and when I stopped doing somersaults, I found myself looking up into a maple at a squirrel looking down at me. Birds were tweeting like an audience laughing.

  Whoa! Trees! Animals! Sherwood Forest! And obviously straight from my imagination, because how could it possibly exist inside the big fat ugly pus-pool Odum had made out of the gore? But I found my way back the next day, and it was still there. A real oasis. My oasis. Nobody else in the world knew about it. If they did, the ORC goons would’ve mined the smithereens out of it like they had every other inch of the gore. It was located at the tip end of the triangle and partly hemmed in by slag piles.

  At first I just went to my oasis on sunny days and lay in the deep bed of moss in the middle of the trees to read my comics. Sometimes I’d hold my finger up to trace the pattern of my favorite maple up and up, each branch stretching out into other branches almost but not exactly the same. Sometimes I’d draw it. Two squirrels often chased each other along the limbs. It amazed me, the way their fooling around could make the whole tree shiver. They’d skitter off balance, then save themselves by catching hold of a tiny twig as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

  The problem was, I couldn’t go to the oasis on the days when I wanted to the most—the rainy ones. It drove me bonkers staying in that tight little house with Ma’s stinky cigarette smoke and Pa’s blaring TV and Grum’s ugly tangled yarn blob. Jed had let us hang out in his castle (formerly known as our playhouse), but Barbie was always out there reading and complaining if I breathed too loud.

  Then one day while I was picking raspberries from the bushes that grew high at the back of the oasis, I discovered the cave. It was just tall enough to stand in at the center and deep enough to sleep in. Like a six-man tent. Roomier than my so-called room at home, a lot more private, and just as comfortable, too, by the time I got done remodeling.

  First I made walls out of stones at the outside edges of the cave, fitting each rock just right, like Pa had taught me when we made the play castle. He could do any kind of handyman stuff, but masonry was his best thing. Ma kept a photo album of the rock walls and fireplaces he’d built in the gore. Now the pictures were the only things left of them.

  Next I found a piece of warped plywood i
n Pa’s scrap heap and rigged it up as a drawbridge. Then I dug a moat around the entrance and lined it with clay to catch water and drain into the little brook that bubbled up from a spring nearby. Near where we used to fish. I liked to imagine we were back there, me and Jed and Pa.

  Inside the cave I made shelves out of rocks and boards. I brought over some blankets, snacks, comics, and some of my rock collection (not the little pebbles I liked to hold in my hand to help me stop thinking at night and fall asleep).

  It took me weeks, but when I was done I had myself a little palace. The Hole in the Wall.

  After math detention that Thursday when strange things started happening in the henhouse, I saw another strange thing at my oasis. The water bubbling up from the spring was all colorful and foamy. Not a pretty sight. Well, the colors might have been pretty in a rainbow, say, or on a T-shirt. In spring water, not so much. I sure hoped the squirrels weren’t drinking it.

  I grabbed a handful of raisins from the stash I kept inside and munched on them while I read my comics. The raisins had dried out so much I couldn’t chew them with my sore twelve-year-molars, so I just swallowed them whole. Normally I would have washed them down with a swig from the spring, but not today. That rainbow water scared me.