On the Road to Mr. Mineo's Read online

  He swept the floor.

  He changed the water bowls.

  He scrubbed the perches on the walls.

  Mr. Mineo had gotten the homing pigeons from his brother, Carl, who went to live in a nursing home a few months ago. When he had first gotten them, he didn’t think he would like them.

  But he did.

  He didn’t think he would enjoy taking care of them.

  But he did.

  When he was finished cleaning, he scooped birdseed out of a bucket with a coffee can and sprinkled some on the floor. Then he went outside and shook the can, calling, “Come and get it!”

  The seed in the can rattled.

  Mr. Mineo watched the sky. Before long, a cluster of birds appeared in the distance. When they were over the shed, they circled once or twice. Then they swooped down one by one, landed on top of the wire cage, and hopped through the bars of a small window into the shed.

  Edna

  Frankie

  Martha

  Samson

  Leslie

  Taylor

  Amy

  Joe

  Christopher

  and Martin

  But not Sherman.

  Mr. Mineo whistled for Ernie. Then the two of them ambled back up the path to the rusty trailer, Ernie’s stub of a tail wagging and Mr. Mineo muttering, “I’m so aggravated.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Gerald Gets Stuck in the Shrubbery

  One minute Gerald was there.

  And the next minute he wasn’t.

  Stella peered over the edge of the roof. Gerald had lucked out. He had landed in the thick shrubbery along the side of the garage.

  “You lucked out!” she called down to Gerald.

  From somewhere in the distance came the tinkling music of an ice cream truck. Stella fought the urge to hurry down the ladder and go look for it. She peered down at Gerald, sprawled on his back in the shrubbery.

  He looked a little surprised, his eyes wide and his mouth opened in an O shape.

  “You okay?” she called to him.

  Gerald blinked up at her. “I can’t move,” he whispered.

  “Why not?”

  Gerald started to cry.

  “Stay right there.” Stella scrambled down the ladder and ran around to the side of the garage.

  “Whatever you do,” she said, “don’t cry.”

  Stella’s brother, Levi, had a nose for crying kids. He sniffed them out like a coonhound. Then he and his scabby-kneed, germ-infested friends C.J. and Jiggs would laugh and taunt and joke and poke and generally make life more miserable for whoever was crying.

  Especially Gerald.

  “I can’t move,” Gerald whispered again, sniffling.

  “Are you paralyzed?” Stella poked at Gerald’s chubby white knee.

  “Prickers,” he said in a quivering voice.

  “What?”

  “Prickers.”

  Sure enough, the shrubbery that Gerald had had the good luck to land in was filled with prickers. Sharp, mean-looking prickers that grabbed at Gerald’s shirt and left angry red scratches on his arms and legs.

  “What am I going to do?” Gerald looked at Stella out of the corner of his eye, keeping his head still, his neck stiff.

  Stella tapped her chin. “Hmmm,” she said. “Let me think.”

  Stella thought.

  And Gerald waited.

  Stella thought.

  And Gerald waited.

  “Okay,” she said. “I have a good idea.”

  Gerald groaned.

  “We’ll hold hands,” she said. “And then, on the count of three, I’ll pull you out.” She beamed at Gerald. “Trust me,” she added. “I’ll do it so fast you won’t feel a thing.”

  Gerald looked at Stella in a wild-eyed kind of way and said, “But I don’t want to.”

  Stella jammed her fists into her waist. “You want Levi and those germ-infested friends of his to get a whiff of you stuck in the bushes crying?”

  Gerald’s eyes grew wider.

  “Okay, then,” Stella said. “Let’s do it.”

  She took both of Gerald’s hands in hers.

  “On the count of three,” she said.

  “One.

  “Two.

  “Three.”

  Stella tugged.

  And tugged.

  And tugged some more.

  It took a lot more tugs than Stella thought it would. She tried to ignore Gerald’s hollering and just concentrate on tugging.

  Finally, Gerald was free. He lay on the ground beside the shrubbery in a scratched-up, torn-shirt heap. Stella stood over him, her hands on her knees.

  His eyes were closed.

  “Gerald?”

  He opened one eye.

  And then the other one.

  “Okay, good,” Stella said. Then she raced over to the garage and started up the ladder to look for the one-legged pigeon.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Gerald Finally Says No

  Gerald blinked up at the sky.

  He took a breath in.

  He let a breath out.

  He was still alive. But he was all scratched up and ached from head to toe.

  Stella poked her head over the edge of the garage roof and whispered, “That pigeon’s back.” Her curly hair stood out around her head like a lion’s mane.

  “Leave me alone,” Gerald said, examining his scratched-up arms.

  “I have another idea,” Stella whispered down to him.

  Gerald sighed.

  “We’ll make a trap,” she said.

  Gerald picked leaves out of his hair, pretending like he didn’t hear her.

  “We can use the trash can and prop it up with a stick and tie a string to the stick and put some birdseed under it and…”

  Gerald limped over to the back porch. He dabbed at his arms and legs with his shirttail while Stella yammered away about her cockamamie idea. He wanted her to go home.

  Stella came down the ladder and disappeared into the garage.

  Gerald pretended not to notice.

  A few minutes later, she came out of the garage with a long wooden dowel and skipped over to the ladder. “Come on,” she called as she scrambled back up to the roof.

  Gerald heaved another sigh.

  Then he plodded, stoop-shouldered, to the ladder and climbed up to the roof to join Stella.

  * * *

  They spent all afternoon working on the trap that Stella had designed. But they had a lot of problems.

  The trash can wouldn’t stay propped up with the dowel.

  The dowel was too long.

  The trash can was too big.

  Then Stella tried to convince Gerald to climb over the fence to the yard next door and borrow a little birdseed from Mildred Perry’s bird feeder.

  “Come on, Gerald,” Stella said. “Please?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  “Give me one good reason.”

  Gerald gave Stella three good reasons:

  1. Mildred Perry had a big mangy dog that once ate his sister’s purse.

  2. Mildred Perry had a teenage son who smoked cigarettes and squealed the tires of his pickup truck in the middle of the night.

  3. He didn’t want to.

  Stella looked a little surprised.

  Gerald felt a little surprised. He never said no to Stella.

  She plopped down on one of the lawn chairs and crossed her arms, glaring at him.

  The sun was beginning to sink behind the trees. Lightning bugs flickered down in the yard below. Gerald’s gray-faced dog whined at the back door.

  And high above the rooftops of Meadville, a one-legged pigeon headed toward the outskirts of town.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Little Brown Dog

  On the far end of Main Street, where the shops ended and the cornfields and orchards began, was a farm with a small brick house and a big wooden barn. A little brown dog had been living in the big wo
oden barn.

  Nobody fed the little brown dog.

  Nobody played with the little brown dog.

  Nobody loved the little brown dog.

  Amos and Ethel Roper lived in the brick house and had no idea the little brown dog was living in the barn.

  Amos and Ethel had no children to take care of. Theirs were all grown up and had flown the coop, as Amos often said.

  “You spend half your life wiping their noses and buying them stuff they don’t need and driving them to the emergency room for stitches and then they fly the coop,” he complained.

  Amos and Ethel had no crops to take care of. The big fancy cannery down in Columbia had bought the Ropers’ fields and sent big fancy machines to harvest the beans and the corn.

  So Amos and Ethel had a lot of time to argue.

  They argued about whether to fix that rotten railing on the back porch or just let the dang thing fall off.

  They argued about whether to cut down the sweet gum tree that was shading their small tomato garden under the kitchen window or to move the tomatoes out by the clothesline.

  And they argued about what kind of critter had been hanging around the place at night.

  Something had been getting into the garbage by the back door.

  Something had been scratching at the soft, rotting wood of the barn.

  And something had been making holes in the dry red dirt under the old pig trough.

  Amos was convinced it was a raccoon.

  Ethel was convinced it was a skunk.

  They argued and argued.

  But when they were awakened in the middle of the night by the sharp, frantic barking of a dog out in the barn, they knew they had both been wrong.

  “A dog!” Ethel said, padding to the window in her bare feet and her thin flowered nightgown.

  “I told you it wasn’t a skunk,” Amos said, pulling the sheet over his head.

  The dog barked and barked and barked some more.

  “What are we going to do?” Ethel said.

  Zzzzzzz.

  Amos’s snores swirled around the room and irritated Ethel. She took a flashlight out of the drawer of the nightstand and went to the back door.

  The dog was still barking. She shined the flashlight across the yard. Everything seemed so still and spooky.

  The clothesline.

  The wheelbarrow.

  The broken lawn mower.

  The hose snaking from the faucet over to the tomato patch.

  Ethel crept down the back steps and out into the yard. The tall grass was cool and damp beneath her bare feet. When she got closer to the barn and shined the flashlight in big sweeping arcs, the dog stopped barking.

  Ethel shivered in the breezy night air. She should have grabbed her sweater from the coat rack by the back door. She tiptoed over the smooth, packed dirt of the path that led to the barn.

  The dog barked again. One uncertain yip of a bark.

  Ethel shined the flashlight into the half-open door of the barn.

  There was a very faint rustle in the pile of old hay in the corner.

  There was a very faint fluttering of wings up in the rafters.

  There was a very faint pitter-patter of Ethel’s heart under her thin flowered nightgown.

  She shined the flashlight into the corner where she had heard the faint rustle. A little brown dog stood knee-deep in the hay, looking up into the rafters.

  Ethel shined the flashlight into the hayloft above her. A pigeon sat nestled in a deserted barn-owl nest where the rafter met the roof.

  “Who invited y’all into my barn?” Ethel called, stepping through the door.

  The pigeon flapped and fluttered in the rafters overhead, then landed on the rotting floor of the hayloft and hopped frantically on one leg before swooping out of the large opening near the top of the barn roof.

  The little brown dog dashed across the barn past Ethel, nearly knocking her off her feet as he scrambled out the door and disappeared into the darkness.

  The faint pitter-patter of Ethel’s heart turned into a ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom. She staggered backward, tripped over that ancient milk bucket she had told Amos to move about a million times, dropped the flashlight, and landed with an oomph on the dusty barn floor.

  And while all the rustling and fluttering and dashing and swooping and oomphing was going on out in the barn, a loud, steady zzzzz drifted out of the Ropers’ bedroom window, swirled over the path to the barn, and irritated Ethel.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Pigeon in the Moonlight

  Fee fi fo fum

  Fee fi fo fum

  Fee fi fo fum

  Stella whispered words through her bedroom window.

  The words swirled around in the still night air and danced dreamily up Waxhaw Lane.

  Across the street, in the big white house with blue-striped awnings, Gerald stared at the ceiling and worried.

  He had never said no to Stella before.

  He tiptoed to his window and peered out into the darkness. Somewhere in the distance a cat was yowling. The mournful sound echoed up the empty Main Street of Meadville.

  While Stella whispered and Gerald worried and the cat yowled, a little brown dog trotted along the side of the road.

  And high above the fields and road signs and telephone poles on the outskirts of town, a one-legged pigeon flew silently in the moonlight.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Boy Who Cried Wolf

  Just beyond the Ropers’ small brick house, there was a long dirt driveway. At the end of the driveway was a cluster of ramshackle houses. Living in each of the ramshackle houses was a family named Raynard.

  Earl and Maude Raynard and their tiny baby, Earl Jr.

  Jackson and Yolanda Raynard and their five kids, whose names all started with the letter B.

  Emmaline Raynard and her three dogs and four cats and a ferret that smelled bad all the time.

  And Alvin and Celia Raynard and their son, whose real name was Lawson but whom everyone called Mutt.

  Mutt Raynard was a liar.

  Everyone knew it.

  Mutt lied about almost everything.

  What he ate for breakfast.

  Where he caught the catfish he brought home for dinner.

  How he lost his shoes.

  Almost everything.

  Maude Raynard called him the Boy Who Cried Wolf. “Look, Mutt,” she told him. “Nobody’s ever gonna believe one dang thing you say, even when you tell the truth. Like the Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

  But that didn’t seem to have much of an impact on Mutt.

  Sometimes he told the truth.

  And sometimes he lied.

  And nobody knew which was which and nobody really cared anymore.

  So when Mutt told everyone that a one-legged pigeon had landed on his head, nobody paid any attention.

  The next day, when he told them it had happened again, nobody paid any attention.

  “I swear,” he said. “A one-legged pigeon. He came swooping out of nowhere and landed right on my head.” He patted the top of his head. “Up yonder by the lake.” He threw his skinny arm out in the direction of the lake.

  But nobody paid any attention.

  So Mutt was going to go to the lake every day and wait for that pigeon to show up again. And when it did, he would catch it. He would put it in a cardboard box and take it to each of the Raynard houses and say, “See? I told you a one-legged pigeon landed on my head.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Levi and His Scabby-Kneed, Germ-Infested Friends

  As waves of steamy heat hovered above the asphalt on Waxhaw Lane, three boys sat in the shade of a carport, complaining.

  It was too hot.

  There was nothing to do.

  They were hungry.

  They were thirsty.

  And one of them had poison ivy.

  They wished they were at the lake.

  They wished they were in the mountains.

  They wished they were anywhere but under a c
arport in Meadville, South Carolina.

  When they couldn’t think of anything else to complain about, they took turns flipping bottle caps into the middle of an old tire.

  The morning plodded along.

  Minute after boring minute.

  Across the street a sprinkler sputtered in circles in Gerald Baxter’s yard, while his gray-faced dog snored in the sun on the sidewalk out front.

  Somewhere up the street, kids were hollering “Not it!”

  And then something strange happened.

  A one-legged pigeon landed right beside the old tire under the carport.

  The boys stared in disbelief.

  One of the boys, Levi, whispered, “I’m going to catch him.”

  The other two boys, C.J. and Jiggs, nodded.

  Levi lunged for the pigeon. There was a swirl of flapping wings, and Levi landed on his stomach with a thud as the pigeon flew off, disappearing over the top of the Baxters’ house.

  Levi scrambled to his feet and called, “Come on!” as he raced across the street, with C.J. and Jiggs hurrying after him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Diddly-Squat

  Stella and Gerald sat in the lawn chairs on the garage roof and ate waffles in silence, dipping them into syrup in a paper cup.

  Stella had tried to stay mad at Gerald for not helping her with the pigeon trap.

  That morning, instead of racing across the street and climbing the wooden ladder to the garage roof, she had sat inside the empty doghouse in her front yard and made a beaded necklace.

  She wrote swear words with a stick in the dirt at the edge of the road and then rubbed them out with the toe of her sandal.

  She made a jump rope out of clothesline and hopped on her right foot up the sidewalk and on her left foot down the sidewalk.

  But then she got bored.

  So she had sauntered across the street and climbed the wooden ladder to the garage roof. Gerald had been sitting there, eating waffles and looking forlorn.

  He had offered her a waffle.

  So here they sat, dipping and eating.

  Dipping and eating.

  And then something very unexpected happened.

  The one-legged pigeon appeared out of nowhere, swooped down, and landed on Gerald’s shoulder.

  Stella couldn’t believe her eyes.

  “Be still,” she whispered.