It's Up to Charlie Hardin – eARC by Dean Ing Read Free Book Online Page B

he did when playing checkers. At last: “More fun if we just put ’em somewhere so they’ll get found someday, like they’d been lost ever since Easter Sunday.”
    “Found by who?”
    Aaron grinned and shrugged. “Anybody but us,” he said. So the boys disposed of their yellow bombs together, nestled out of sight at the base of a shrub in the hedge of a childless neighbor. The disposal was noticed by no one; well, almost no one.

    Ever since he stood over that tangle of mesquite at the sinkhole and grasped the notion of a secret path in plain sight, the idea had festered in Charlie’s mind. After supper on Friday, he rummaged among garden tools in search of something powerful enough to help him cut small branches but soon realized that the task was beyond him. He might have enlisted Aaron, but Friday evenings in the Fischer home were devoted to other things. Besides, something in the solitary nature of his project appealed to him, something he knew might fill his pal with awe. So when Charlie spotted his mother’s new rose clippers, a new use for them sprang into being in an instant.
    The tool wasn’t too big, and its scissoring blades were sharp as knives. And while his original escape highway had begun to seem too much like work, he did not need much time to settle on an alternative that was closer than the creek.
    When Charlie slipped away up the street at sundown with the clippers in a hip pocket, he knew exactly where he was going and thought that he might get a good start on his project before the April twilight faded.
    His goal was a solitary midsized oak that leaned in toward the old stone wall surrounding the castle courtyard. From open windows in homes along the street he could hear bits of dialogue and laughter from radios, though television had not yet infected Texas airwaves. No nosy adults lurked in porch swings to wonder why some neighborhood kid was fooling around in a tree during twilight at the castle wall.
    Once, he had been small enough to hide in bushes as Roy still did. But Charlie had grown enough to shinny up the oak which hung over the wall, its branches drooping far down inside toward the sunken courtyard. Another oak, huge and spreading, stood in the courtyard’s very center, and Charlie had vague plans for it.
    Neighborhood myth claimed that, long ago, a boy had once tried to climb the outer wall itself. No one Charlie knew had ever been so foolish because a century before, such walls were erected with broken bottles cemented into their tops. Standing at the smaller oak Charlie could see the last rays of sunlight glinting from cruel shards that might injure generations to come.
    But Charlie had once seen Jackie Rhett use the oak as a path, merely to show off, daring anyone to follow. Jackie had picked his way up ignoring welts from tough little branches, well above the top of the wall, then across and finally, hand over hand and aided by gravity, down inside through foliage to the sunken meadow of the courtyard. At last Jackie had hung there for a full minute, his feet still more than a man’s height above the ground, before trying—and failing—to climb back up. Eventually he had dropped to roll in the weedy meadow, then limped proudly to the carriage gate before squeezing his belly out between rust-scabbed iron bars. That was when Charlie knew Jackie had found no special path, had formed no highway of his own. An idea of that sort was not like Jackie Rhett.
    Ideas of that sort were up to Charlie Hardin.
    The first few feet of oak trunk were nearly vertical but, pressing his back against the wall, Charlie found that he could thrust his feet against rough bark and walk up the trunk far enough to grasp low branches. After that it was easier to pull himself up to where the trunk sloped inward toward the wall.
    Here Jackie had fought his way across dense foliage a few inches above broken glass, through branches too thick to trim with mere clippers. But after snipping off one finger-thick