The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [7]
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 in Pa’s scrap heap