The Friendship Song Read online

  My room could wait a few minutes. I ran downstairs and out the back door. Forget wearing a jacket, because it was warm as summer out, even though it was only April. I found my way across the first part of the yard to the water. I say “found” because it took some doing. I mean there were about sixteen piles of stuff in my way. But I managed, and it was worth it. The ponds were way cool. They were made out of a car-top carrier, and a fuel oil tank cut in half, and a concrete septic ring, and an upside-down Volkswagen body, and just about anything big and hollow Gus could stick into the ground. Most of them had goldfish in them. Some of those goldfish were the size of bass, and besides being gold some of them were black and some were pinto-spotted.

  Once I had seen the creek I was going to head back to my room, but then I got just a glimpse of something big and bright red up ahead. You know how it is when you’re around something really bright nail-polish red. I had to go see what it was.

  So I stepped across the creek. But on the other side of it the yard was like a maze, even worse than before. Not a mess, not like a garbage dump—in fact it was real neat. But also real confusing. Gus kept a lot of her stuff either stacked under trees or else in lines with aisles in between. The junk was piled up so high that most of the time I couldn’t see out of whatever aisle I was in. I’d end up going the opposite direction from the one I wanted. Or, really, not knowing what direction I was headed at all.

  And sometimes I got the feeling that something didn’t want to let me in.

  It wasn’t like hands against my shoulders this time, it was just a thick feeling, like when you walk into a room full of people who don’t care about you. Even though nothing had happened to me I started to feel scared. And then I thought about what’s-his-face, the kid who said he was in this yard for two days. If he was pretty stupid, maybe he really could have gotten lost back here. But maybe it wasn’t just that he got lost.

  I’d had enough. I turned around and headed back the way I came, and then—you guessed it. I couldn’t find my way out.

  I told myself that it was just that I had got myself in a panic. I told myself to calm down and think straight, but it was no use. I couldn’t calm down, and I couldn’t even find my way back to the creek, where I maybe could have lived on raw goldfish for a week. I ran around that crazy maze for, I guess, ten minutes, but it felt like ten hours, until I was all hot and bothered and just about ready to cry.

  “Groover?”

  It was Gus, heading up one of the aisles toward me. I’d never been so glad to see anybody in my life, and also I just absolutely hated her.

  She said, “Hey, you shouldn’t run around like a goofball in this heat. You’re all red. C’mon, let’s go get some sun tea.”

  Being scared makes me mad, and being mad made me open my mouth and tell her what I thought, especially since my dad wasn’t anywhere around. I yelled, “I am not a goofball! This yard is weird, and so are you. I wish my dad had never met you.”

  She just looked at me with foggy gray eyes and said, “I see.”

  She couldn’t see, not really, or she would be fighting back. I mean, to me this was war. I stopped yelling, but I meant what I said even more when I told her, “I don’t like it here, and I don’t like you.”

  “I hear you.” She wasn’t smiling, but she didn’t seem angry either, which made me want to scream. I wanted her to be angry, but all she did was say, “Have you told your father any of this?”

  “A little.” Very little.

  “Maybe you should tell him. Don’t expect me to do it. You can speak for yourself.” She smiled then, but not exactly at me. “Come on. Let’s go cool off.”

  She led the way back to the house, and I had to either stay out there by myself or follow, so I followed.

  Supper was kind of quiet, because I wasn’t talking any more than I had to. Speak for myself, huh. I’d never in a thousand years say hateful things to my dad the way I did to Gus, and especially not if she wanted me to. About the only thing I said at suppertime was that I was tired, which gave me an excuse to go to bed early. Which I did, around dusk. Before I got undressed I looked across the street at Rawnie’s house, but I didn’t see her anywhere. Not that I could really expect her to be still sitting on her stoop.

  I really was tired, but for a long time I couldn’t get to sleep, lying there in a strange room with my own yelling still echoing in my head and big stupid metal circles hanging in the windows. They threw weird shadows. I wanted to take them down, but I didn’t quite dare, because I had the feeling there might really be something outside, and whatever it was I wanted it to stay there. I kept listening for noises. Sometimes I even half thought I heard something.

  I did hear something.

  Faint, very faint, like somebody playing a faraway radio, except—there was something about this music that wasn’t like radio music at all. Something wild and wailing, something that made my spine chill. You couldn’t put this music on a tape or in a radio or anything small. It wouldn’t fit in that kind of box, and you couldn’t catch it that way. I could barely hear it, but it scared me. I knew it was bigger than the world. I knew it was sending echoes as far as the stars.

  I knew I had to be going crazy.

  No. No, it wasn’t me. It was this crazy place.

  Next thing I was up out of bed, intent on tracking down—what? A wisp of sound, so soft my own breathing drowned it out. I couldn’t hear it once I moved, but I had a feeling it would be there again as soon as I lay down.

  Finally I turned on a light and hunted around in my boxes until I found my Walkman, and then I turned off the light again and tuned myself in. Or out. Whatever. I lay in bed with the headphones over my ears, hoping Neon Shadow would come on, and after a while they did, and it was “The Friendship Song.”

  Friend, friend, friend,

  You’re my father, you’re my mother

  You’re my sister and my brother.

  Hey, what we’ve always been

  Is what we’re always gonna be,

  We’re yang and yin,

  We’re sun and wind,

  We’re eternity,

  We’re friends.

  What the heck were yang and yin? But I didn’t care. The song made me feel that everything was going to be all right. I went to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The next day, Sunday, I just stayed in my room pretty much all day. I had a lot of boxes to unpack and arranging to do, right? Right. I saw Rawnie sitting on her stoop in the afternoon, but I was too busy to go over and ask her if I could walk to school with her. Especially since she might ask questions about how I was doing at Gus’s house.

  All day till dusk I was too busy to even think, which was the way I wanted it. But then, just about the time the sky started to turn gray, there it was again: guitar notes the same pale steel color as the sky, and sounding just about as far away.

  It wasn’t like any music I’d ever heard before. You know how sometimes a rockabilly guitar player can hit the strings just like ringing a bunch of bells? It was sort of like that, but sort of not like that at all. Really it was more like hearing a wildcat snarling in the dark. If it wasn’t that it sounded so far away I probably would have crawled into bed. I wanted to. What I was hearing made me feel shivery and cold.

  I listened for about half a minute, and then I barged out of my room, down the stairs, and out the front door, which I slammed, and I stomped across the street to Rawnie’s place like it was all her fault. She wasn’t on her steps, but her door was open and she was right inside it. She’d been watching TV, I guess, and heard me coming.

  “I’m not scared!” I yelled at her.

  She just stood there staring at me, and who can blame her? Here I was, charging at her like a moose and bellowing like one too, and there she was standing like an Egyptian princess or something. With little sparks of gold in her ears. She had pierced ears already. I’d been begging Dad for years to let me get my ears pierced, and he kept saying not until I was thirteen. Rawnie had probably ha
d her ears pierced since she was a baby.

  I made myself calm my voice down, and I said sort of movie-hero style, “Look, we’re going to figure this thing out right now. Come on.” I beckoned at her and headed back down her steps.

  “What? Wait a minute!” she said, but she came out her door and followed me. I was in moose-stampede mode again, so she didn’t catch up to me until I was back across the street in Gus’s front yard. My front yard now.

  “Heather—”

  “My name’s Harper!”

  She grabbed me by the arm to make me stand still, and said, “Harper, what are you trying to do?”

  Then she heard it too. I could tell by the look on her face. She didn’t look scared or big-eyed, the way she was when I charged her. Her face just got real, real still.

  “Wow,” she whispered. “What’s that?”

  Thing is, what we were hearing was so freaky that sometimes it didn’t even sound like music. Sometimes it sounded more like metal banging against metal back in Gus’s junk collection somewhere. Or like tree branches complaining in the wind or maybe tapping against something hollow. But that was just on the surface that it sounded like noise. Underneath, it was music, it felt like music all the time. It went through you.

  “That is what we are going to figure out,” I said to Rawnie, quiet now. “What it is and where it’s coming from.”

  “Okay,” Rawnie said. At the time it didn’t surprise me. I just sort of figured she’d want to know, like I did. But looking back now it surprises me a lot. Why didn’t she just say, “No way!” and go home? She barely knew me. But she said, “Okay.”

  We stayed close together and started up the front yard, with the cactus and all the rest of the stuff looking down at us. It was starting to get dark, and the street lamps were coming on. Something threw a shadow on my face, and I flinched. “Hey,” I said.

  The octopus arms on the top of the spindle thing were going around. Each one had a bright-colored fan of metal at the end. “That’s a whirligig,” Rawnie said. “It moves in the wind.”

  “Oh.” I watched it a minute. It was making a squeaking sound. “That’s not it,” I said.

  “No.”

  We eased deeper into the yard until we were going past the side of the house. It had a big old porch all around the first floor, and I noticed clusters of metal tubing hanging from the edge of its roof, making soft dinging noises. “Wind chimes,” I said. I guessed Gus had made them, because they were weird, like her, with freak-face circles for the pipes to hang from. Later I found out I was right, she did, but by then so much had happened they didn’t seem weird anymore.

  “That’s not it either,” Rawnie said.

  “Darn,” I said. We kept going toward the backyard, past some stripped-down motorcycles, an old gas pump with a broken glass globe on the top, some tall things that I figured out later were the skeletons of vending machines, and something that made me jump and go, “Aaaa!” It was a carnival dummy, the kind you might see on top of the funhouse, with its arms in the air.

  “Lights up ahead,” Rawnie said. Her voice quivered and she sounded scared, but she kept right on walking. So was I, getting scared, and I knew if she hadn’t been with me, I would have chickened out and gone back.

  The lights were strange, all colors but very dim and blurred as if they were floating in fog. The distant music seemed maybe to be coming from where the lights were.

  We plodded toward them without saying a word to each other. Like a pair of zombies we reached the creek and stepped over. Still side by side, we went through the maze of aisles and piled-up junk, and with the lights coloring the sky to guide us, it wasn’t hard to find our way. As we got nearer, the music didn’t really seem to get any nearer, but I felt a sort of heartbeat behind it, a dark rapid pounding rhythm I heard more with my feet than with my ears.

  “Drums?” I whispered to Rawnie. Whispering seemed like the thing to do at the time.

  She just nodded. Maybe her voice wasn’t working. I could see her shaking. The aisle was getting too narrow for both of us to go at once, and Rawnie slowed down and signaled me with her hand to go ahead. I didn’t want to do it, but I knew it wasn’t fair to make her go first when I was the one who’d had the bright idea to do this. So I went.

  The aisle took a turn, and the next thing I knew, I was heading straight toward the music and looking straight at something big and bright red, and I stopped where I was. I lifted my hand to point, and I wanted to tell Rawnie to look, but before I could say anything a voice yelled, “Yo!”

  I wanted to either run or faint, but I just stood there. Rawnie crammed herself up next to me, and we both stared, and there was Gus, smiling all over her pink face at both of us.

  “Yo, Groover!” she called. “Who’s your friend?” She didn’t look the least bit mad or anything. Not that we were doing anything wrong, but for some reason I felt—I don’t know. Like we were trespassing or party-crashing or something. Like we were breaking and entering and somebody might call the cops. I just felt really creepy about being there, and I was glad Gus wasn’t anywhere near us where she could get her big hands on us.

  I wondered what she was doing. There was no way I could tell, because she was on the other side of the big red—car, it was a car sitting up on concrete blocks. A huge car, bright and slick, like red red lipstick. In fact, an absolutely humongous red car with majorly large fins, and Gus was looking at Rawnie and me over a sheet of plywood laid across its seats, over the top of where the roof should have been, so I realized it was a convertible.

  I think Gus knew who Rawnie was all the time, because she just kept talking. “Isn’t she a beauty?” I thought at first she meant Rawnie, but then the direction she pointed that schnoz of hers told me she meant the car. “She’s a nineteen fifty-nine Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz. The jerk I got her from kept her under a tarp and made her rust.” Gus made that sound like a punishable crime, then let it go. “But I’ll take care of her. Isn’t she something?”

  I guess she was, because I’d never seen a car that big, and the shape of the fins and taillights made it look rocket-powered. But I wasn’t interested in talking about a junker car right then. I said, “Gus, did you hear something? Like some kind of weird music?”

  “Well, I’ll be.” She glanced from me to Rawnie, who just stood there looking back at her. Gus seemed kind of surprised. “Yeah, I did hear something,” she said after a minute, “but it’s gone now.”

  She was right about that. It was.

  “You guys want to help me put another coat of paint on this baby?” Gus asked.

  If she’d been working on the car for long, that sort of explained the lights. There were four big lights set up around it, strange-looking ones not on poles but in six-sided metal buildings made of tall pillars with funky metal flowers at the top. These things were standing in just about the place where we had seen weird lights in all colors. But these light bulbs were plain white, and they were bright, not dim like the ones we had seen.

  Rawnie was looking at them too, and she took a couple of steps forward and asked Gus, “What kind of lights are those?”

  “Nice, aren’t they? Art deco. They’re off an old bridge.” Which didn’t exactly answer the question, somehow, but at that point my father walked in.

  I say “in” because the car and the lights were in sort of a clearing in the middle of the backyard and all its junk. For some reason Gus had welded together a few dozen of those old metal lawn chairs, all different kinds, into rows of six each, like big metal sofas, and they were in there too. They made it even harder to get around. Anyway, Dad walked in by another aisle, past some metal buckets and washtubs and things, like it was no trouble at all.

  “Hi,” he said to Rawnie with a smile. When he looked at me the smile changed into his mischief grin.

  “Ghosties and ghoulies gonna get you if you don’t scram to bed, Skiddo,” he told me.

  I felt glad to see him, and better because he was there with me, and mad at h
im, all at the same time. See, when I was a little kid he used to read me picture books, and my favorite was the one about the ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night. So when he wanted me to go to bed, all he had to say was, “Ghosties and ghoulies,” and I’d scream and run. We made a game of it. But right then I didn’t appreciate it because, first of all, I wasn’t a little kid anymore and, second of all, I didn’t want to hear about ghosties and ghoulies when I was standing in the middle of Gus’s spooky backyard. I didn’t like being called Skiddo in front of Rawnie either.

  “Dad,” I complained.

  “Okay, earlies and schoolies. You’ve got to get up tomorrow morning.”

  Why do parents always tell kids stuff the kids already know? It wasn’t like I’d forgotten I had school in the morning. Not hardly. “Dad …” I wanted to tell him I was not stupid, but then I decided to forget it, because I had a thought. “Dad, did you hear music a little bit ago?”

  “Music? What kind?”

  “Sort of rock music.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Oh, never mind.” I could see he hadn’t. “Dad, why does Gus have all this, uh, stuff?”

  I was being a little rude on purpose, talking about Gus like she wasn’t there. Dad gave me a look. “Good grief, Harper, ask her.”

  Gus had come over to stand right by me. She didn’t make me ask the question again, though, the way she could have. She just said, “Do you want the truth or the excuse?”